I covered Dr. Oz’s recent change of heart on cholesterol in a previous post. Linked from that post are video clips from the cholesterol segment in question. Unfortunately, there’s an obvious lacuna in the videos hosted on Dr. Oz’s website. Thankfully, Fitness Coach Mark had the presence of mind to record the show and he posted a clip of the missing segment to YouTube:

My friend John is an inspiration, and he’s starting to share his story. Snapshot February 2010: a 1 year old daughter, no insurance, overweight, blood sugar over 600, and desperate for help in a system that excluded him from health care.

Facing the prospect of an early death, he began reading everything he could about diabetes and nutrition and began his journey back to health by following a low carb, then a ketogenic diet.More »

A fantastic talk at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center by Craig P. Thompson, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering.

It starts off with a great overview of cancer in general and the associated metabolic pathways of cancer cells, including the Warburg effect and why cancer cells light up in a PET scan (hint, it’s the glucose!). He also touches on the problems of overconsumption leading to increased IGF-1 stimulation and the resultant increase in glucose uptake by all cells. This, of course, drives tumogenesis.More »

I’m not a fan of Dr. Oz, usually. Mostly because of his dogmatic approach to nutrition that seemed to ignore newer research in favor of the typical orthodoxy. An example of this can be seen in the episode where he had Gary Taubes on as a guest (Segment 1, Segment 2, Segment 3). His smug condescension is almost palpable, and so I wrote him off as a largely well-meaning but misinformed guy.More »

I’ve been meaning to do a deep dive into physiological insulin resistance for quite a while now, but the universe keeps conspiring to take my time. Because I haven’t had time to read, learn more and write about it, I thought I’d share the links I have accumulated thus far. Mostly because I’ve now been asked a variant of the following multiple times, or have seen the following posted on various forums for discussing nutrition, health, and low carbohydrate diets:

I see lots of questions in the various communities regarding the safety of a ketogenic diet. One frequent concern is about what this diet will do to one’s cholesterol numbers. Because of these questions, I recently went through my EMR data and pulled my last few years of cholesterol tests and decided to chart the trends before and after starting a ketogenic diet. Here are the results:

HDL, LDL, Triglycerides and Total Cholesterol before and after starting a low carb ketogenic diet.More »

Good Caloreis, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes Browse on Amazon I’ve heard people lament, “Gary Taubes is great and all…but he just doesn’t understand the science.” Such people typically have not read the science, much less, Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book is a comprehensive analysis of the history of human nutrition and a seminal book in our understanding of obesity.

If Why We Get Fat is written for the lay-person, this 640 page behemoth is written to satisfy the health professional: exhaustively sourced and referenced, professional yet approachable. It tackles the familiar themes of obesity as the result of excess carbohydrate consumption and posits the insulin hypothesis as the explanation for what ails us. Along the way, he uses arguments and evidence from the domains of anthropology, nutrition and medicine. Really, this is the book you would write if you read every piece of research on nutrition and obesity that was ever written.

Why We Get Fat by Gary TaubesBrowse on Amazon
Gary Taubes saved my life. Or at least, that’s what I tell him.

This book came at a critical point in my life, and reversed an insidious trend of out of control weight gain and mounting health problems.

Written for the lay person, it gives a history of nutrition and obesity, and proposes a new theory as to why modern Americans are predisposed to obesity…except, it’s not a new theory at all: up until World War II, we pretty much knew that sugar and other carbohydrates drove obesity. After World War II, politics forced a rewrite of our understanding of obesity (based on dubious work by Ancel Keys), and we convinced ourselves that fat drove obesity and disease.More »

Thomas Seyfried’s talk at Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 (AHS12) is a deep dive into the origins of cancer, loosely framed around the question, “Is cancer a metabolic disease?” In some ways an extremely provocative talk, but fascinating to watch him step through the science behind assertions like, “Regardless of what you might read, mutations are not the cause of cancer.” (Hint: it’s the mitochondria! “We never find completely normal mitochondria in any cancer cells.”)More »

A fantastic lecture by Dr. Rainer J. Klement (Medical Physicist) of Lets Go Paleo on the role of a low carb ketogenic diet in the prevention and treatment of cancer. The actual title of the Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 (AHS12) presentation is, “Is there a role for a paleolithic lifestyle in the treatment and prevention of cancer?”, but most of the talk focuses on how a low carb diet implemented with good food quality choices (as are often found in paleo nutrition) can not only prevent cancer, but can be used as part of treatment.More »